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Intel is expected to unveil its 22nm Ivy Bridge CPUs in March 2012, with initial offerings focusing on dual- and quad-core models, according to sources at motherboard makers in Taiwan.

Information posted online be the Digitimes.com online publication indicate that the quad-code Ivy Bridge CPUs will have thermal design power (TDP) ratings of 45W, 65W and 77W, while the dual-core models will have TDP ratings of 35W and 55W.

Intel will also launch Z77 and Z75 chipsets to replace its Z68 and P67, and a H77
to replace H67. Additionally, Intel will also release Q77, Q75 and B75 chipsets
for business models, replacing the Q67, Q65 and B65.

Intel gave its first public disclosure of Ivy Bridge at the Intel Developer Forum
last month. Intel said that successor to the Sandy Bridge design boast significant
improvements in on-board graphics, overall performance and a handful of advances
in power management and security.

Ivy's central core design is similar to Sandy Bridge in some ways as it features
the same two-chip solution - PCH and CPU - socket, shared cache, and
memory-controller found on the incumbent chip.

However, shifting down to 22nm and using the tri-gate FinFET transistors enables
Intel to offer either greater power efficiency or more performance than Sandy
Bridge for a set die size. Intel said that teh new chips deliver twice the
performance or half the power compared to 32nm Sandy Bridge chips.

Ivy Bridge graphics support Microsoft's Direct X 11 graphics APIs, an area where
Intel parts used to lag a generation. They also add support for three simultaneous
displays and an L3 cache.

The company said that the graphics support 32 times more scatter/gather operations
than the current Sandy Bridge chips. By increasing thread counts and moving to
issuing multiple threads in parallel, the cores now support twice the instructions
per cycle, Intel said.

Intel said it enhanced video performance of the Ivy Bridge cores in at least two
ways. Designers boosted media sampler throughput for better scaling and filtering
and added new color and contrast enhancements to the pixel-processing at the back
end of the process.

The media blocks also added support for encoding using the multi-view codec, key
to support for stereo 3-D.

Intel added to the chip a digital random number generator that meets key ANSI and
FIPS security standards. It also added a capability to prevent security attacks
based on a process requesting an escalation of privileges.

For power management, Ivy Bridge can shut off I/O power to DDR memory in deep
sleep states. It can also automatically route threads to the most power efficient
core and optimize voltage use to the most optimal level.

Ivy Bridge supports both DDR3 memory and the new DDR3L low power chips. In
addition, it allows overclocking in 200 MHz increments without resetting BIOS,
including over-clocking memory up to 2,800 MT/second.